blankets, which could be more quickly made than traditional dog and goat blankets, to surrounding communities. The practice of keeping woolly dogs separate from village dogs began to decline until herds of woolly dog eventually disappeared by the mid-19th century. The last known Salish woolly dog was said to have died in 1940.
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Textiles confirmed to be woven with wool- ly dog hair are rare in museum collections. The only known woolly dog fleece is in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, collected in the mid-1800s. Determining what kind of wool was used
to weave textiles by just looking at them is nearly impossible. Microscopic analysis has been used for some time to link threads to their animal or plant source, but Smithso- nian’s National Museum of the American Indian and NMNH used a more precise ap- proach to verify if any of the Salish textiles in the museums’ collections were actually wo- ven with dog hair. In 2010, NMAI textile conservator Susan
Heald and conservation scientist Caroline Solazzo at Smithsonian’s Museum Conser- vation Institute used protein mass spec- trometry to examine small fiber samples taken from nine blankets, a fur robe and a belt in the NMNH and NMAI collections. The textiles all dated from 1803 to 1927. This technique looks at the structural proteins in the fibers to identify the genus of the species used. As Heald says, “dog hair would have a different protein fingerprint than goat hair or sheep hair, and proteomic analysis quanti- fies those differences.” Compared to micros- copy, which relies on a hair’s morphological features, or structure, she says “proteomics can offer more specificity, especially when a fiber’s morphology is altered by age and physical damage.” In a paper published in Antiquity in 2011,
These two blankets may look similar, but by examining the protein structure of the hair used to weave them. the blanket in NMAI collection (top 14/4864) from about 1860 was found to be woven with goat and sheep wool, whereas the one dating to 1830 from NMNH’s collection (bottom E2124) was determined to contain dog hair in addition to goat hair.
Top: Salish, 1860, 44”x 46”, 14/4864; Bottom: Salish, 1830, 50” x 53”, E2124 38 AMERICAN INDIAN WINTER 2020
the researchers revealed that whereas five blankets, the robe and the belt at NMNH all contained dog hair, none was found in any of the three blankets in the NMAI’s collections. These were woven with goat hair, and one blanket from each museum also contained sheep wool. The plain twill woven ceremonial blan-
kets in NMAI’s collections were created using mountain goat hair. This could indicate that goat hair was preferable over dog hair for cer- emonial items. Dog hair was also used in all the textiles produced prior to 1862 but absent
DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY, NATIONAL MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY,; PHOTO BY DONALD E. HURLBERT
PHOTO BY NMAI STAFF
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